`La-La Land:’ Boehner Sees LA in DC

Merriam-Webster defines it as “a euphoric dreamlike mental state detached from the harsher realities of life.”

House Speaker John Boehner today called President Barack Obama’s proposal of $1.6 trillion in taxes as part of a solution to averting the so-called fiscal cliff at year’s end a “la-la land offer, which couldn’t pass the House, couldn’t pass the Senate.”

It’s also the name of a 1996 song by Shihad:

“We’re in the land, la la la land the land of everything and nothing at all.”’

The name has been applied to Los Angeles.

The Oxford English Dictionary, in its never-ending quest to keep up with the language, agreed last year: “la-la land n. can refer either to Los Angeles (in which case its etymology is influenced by the common initialism for that city), or to a state of being out of touch with reality—and sometimes to both simultaneously.”

And now the House speaker has applied it to a certain neighborhood of Washington, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.